Chapter 4. Navigating the World with TurtleBot

In the previous chapter, the TurtleBot robot was described as a two-wheeled differential drive robot developed by Willow Garage. The setup of the TurtleBot hardware, netbook, network system, and remote computer were explained, so the user could set up and operate his own TurtleBot. Then, the TurtleBot was driven around using the keyboard control, command-line control, and a Python script.

In this chapter, we will expand TurtleBot's capabilities by giving the robot vision. The chapter begins by describing 3D vision systems and how they are used to map obstacles within the camera's field of view. The three types of 3D sensors typically used for TurtleBot are shown and described, detailing their specifications.

Setting up the 3D sensor for use on TurtleBot is described and the configuration is tested in a standalone mode. To visualize the sensor data coming from TurtleBot, two ROS tools are utilized: Image Viewer and rviz. Then...